Blitz

Building ambitious software — Jonathan Kelley, Dioxus Labs & Cognition

Sep 11, 2026 · 19:14

Jonathan Kelley, founder of Dioxus Labs, whose cross-platform Rust app framework now has nearly 37,000 GitHub stars and an estimated 200 million end users and was acquired by Cognition, argues that AI coding agents have made code cheap but quality remains the scarce resource, so architecture now takes most engineering time. He traces Dioxus's five-year effort building everything from scratch, including the Blitz rendering engine with a browser-grade CSS engine lifted from Firefox and the Subsecond hot reload engine that patches running native code in about 100 milliseconds. When agents got good at Rust, his team maxed out their Claude Code subscriptions and produced tens of thousands of lines that mostly never cleared the merge bar, a failure mode he calls becoming a slop cannon. He credits agents for deeply integrated Kotlin and Swift build plugins shipped in two to three weeks, release checklists, backports, and documentation accuracy, while noting they write tests for any API but rarely the right ones, though they excel at fuzzing harnesses. Rust's learning curve, once fought, is now a feature because agents absorb the borrow checker and edge cases.

From Vibe Coding To Vibe Engineering – Kitze, Sizzy

Dec 14, 2025 · 25:28

Kitze, founder of Sizzy, argues that "vibe engineering"—actively steering AI agents with technical knowledge—trumps passive "vibe coding" for building real software. He shares how Cursor's Composer 1 let him port Benji.so and Glink to Next.js 16 with Monorepo in under a week, reviving near-dead projects. Kitze insists LLMs excel at React because humans are bad at it, and that repetitive code is fine since agents don't care. He warns against giving AI tools to juniors without oversight, and predicts the bottom of the job market will thin as agents replace interns. The talk ends with a pitch for "vibe code fixers" as a new role, maintaining legacy systems like cowboy coders.